In 1857 the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott opinion, an opinion that perverted, as Abe Lincoln said, the Constitution. The most interesting statement in the Dred Scott opinion is quoted below:

They (African Americans) had for
more than a century before (the birth of the Constitution) been
regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to
associate with the white race, either in social or political relations;
and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was
bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be
reduced to slavery for his benefit.

The justices pretended to believe
that this one-sided view of history had been written into the
Constitution. A few years later their perverse action led to the
Civil War [1].

After the war ended, our
forefathers amended the Constitution to repudiate the Dred Scott
decision and guarantee various rights to the African-American former
slaves. Since the Supreme Court had proved itself untrustworthy,
the framers of the 14th Amendment wrote it to retain enforcement power
for Congress, rather than the courts. Section 5 of the Amendment
says, "Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate
legislation, the provisions of this article." Such language was
never used in constitutional amendments prior to the Dred Scott
decision. In accordance with this language, Congress passed four
Acts to describe in detail and create enforcement machinery for the
rights that it intended the Amendment to guarantee [2].

For a while, the Supreme Court
laid low. Our judicial employees knew that "We the People" had come dangerously close to taking serious
punitive action against them. However, before long they felt it safe to resume their mischief.
In a long series of new perversions, the Court thought up scams to nullify
most of the enforcement legislation Congress had passed exactly as the 14th Amendment
implicitely promised and explicitely authorized. The Court said that the Amendment didn't provide for the sort of
enforcement legislation that more or less the same congressmen that framed, adopted, and
ratified it voted to enact just a few years later [3].

FULL AND EQUAL ENJOYMENT

The 14th Amendment said [4];

Section 1. All persons
born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the
jurisdiction therof, are citizens of the United States, and of the
State wherin they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law
which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty,
or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person withion
its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.

and

Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this Article.

In 1875, Congress undertook to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this Article. It passed an enforcement Act containing the following language:

Section 1. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public
conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.

Section 2 described penalties for those who violated Section 1.

You will probably be amazed to learn that the Supreme Court declared this enforcement Act unconstitutional. In 1883 (The Civil Rights Cases)
the Court majority (eight out of nine) said the 14th Amendment did not
empower Congress to pass laws affecting "inns, public conveyences on
land and water, theaters, and other places of public amusement."
The Amendment only restricted the actions of "States," not inns,
theaters, railroads, and so forth.

A one justice minority (John
Marshall Harlan) accused his colleagues of playing word games to avoid
what all understood to be the intent of the 14th Amendment.

The substance and spirit of the
recent amendments of the constitution have been sacrificed by a subtle
and ingenious verbal criticism. 'It is not the words of the law
but the internal sense of it that makes the law. The letter of
the law is the body; the sense and reason of the law is the soul.'
Constitutional provisions, adopted in the interest of liberty,
and for the purpose of securing, through national legislation, if need
be, rights inhering in a state of freedom, and belonging to American
citizenship, have been so construed as to defeat the ends the people
desired to accomplish, which they attempted to accomplish, and which
they supposed they had accomplished by changes in their fundamental law
. . . . the court has departed from the familiar rule requiring, in the
interpretation of constitutional provisions, that full effect be given
to the intent with which they were adopted.

Harlan pointed out that inns,
railroads, and other public accommodations operate under the umbrella
of state law. And he identified several earlier cases in which
the Supreme Court had acknowledged that fact and ruled that they were
therefore agents of the state. That the majority chose to ignore
those precedents as well as the obvious intent of the framers, seems to
remove any doubt that the opinion flowed out of their own agenda, not
the Constitution. So what was the nature of that agenda? [5]

The answer requires an insight
into what motivates a justice of the Supreme Court who has an
opportunity to vote on a "constitutional" question. He has little
to fear in the way of consequences for a fraudulent opinion; a justice
has never been impeached and removed for trashing the Constitution.
So when voting on questions concerning which he has a strong
political, religious, or economic bias, he usually votes according to
that bias. His second priority is to defend and enhance the
status and power of our judicial branch of government. Honoring
his oath to uphold the Constitution comes in a distant third [6].

Since they had all been
appointed by Republican presidents, it's unlikely that the eight
justices who voted to sacrifice the "substance and spirit" of the 14th
Amendment were motivated by the poisonous anti-Negro bias common among
Southern Democrats at the time. It seems much more likely that
they acted on their second priority concern. Congress had passed
a law that would require the federal courts to spend much of their time
and energy on what the justices viewed as a lot of petty squabbles
concerning the rights of former slaves to attend the opera and ride
first class on trains and river boats. They didn't want their
exclusive club buried up to its neck in this kind of jurisprudence [7].

Incidently, long after the millions of people damaged by the Civil Rights Cases were dead, our judical employees decided to get a new act. They blessed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which affected "inns, public conveyences on land and water, theaters, and other places of public amusement" pretty much the same way the Acts they had earlier declared unconstitutional did. The 14th Amendment hadn't changed in the interim; but the politics had. And Congress took pains to save our judicial employees from having to revisit the fraud they perpetrated in the Civil Right Cases. Congress wrote the Civil Rights Act to ban discrimination by inns, public accommodations, etc. under its power to regulate interstate commerce rather than its power to enforce the 14th Amendment [8].

PROTECTING THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD COMPANY

Three years after deciding the Civil rights Cases the same
gang of renegade justices explained to Congress what it had intended the 14th Amendment to accomplish. In 1886 they handed down a ruling in the case of Santa Clara County v. The Southern Pacific Railroad Company.
The railroad didn't like the way the County computed its property taxes on some fences along the roadway. So its lawyers took the argument to their friends on the Supreme Court.

The Court said the taxes were
computed by a method that was "too vague and indefinite to serve as a
basis for estimating the aggregate valuation of the fences included in
the assessment . . ." Fair enough; but what made this a U. S.
Constitutional issue?

The answer is hilarious.
The Court said that this sort of thing was exactly what the
framers of the 14th Amendment wrote it to forbid. Before the
Court even listened to arguments Chief Justice Waite announced,

"The court does not wish to
hear argument on the question whether the provision in the 14th
Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any
person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,
applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."

Don't take my word for it, look it up [9].

SEPARATE BUT EQUAL

A decade after that, the Supreme Court turned its attention to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). This time a state
had passed and enforced a law which clearly violated the 14th
Amendment. A fellow named Homer Plessy, who had one-eighth Negro
blood, got himself ejected from the train and tossed in jail for
defying a Louisiana law that mandated racial segregation on railroad
cars. The Supreme Court had already declared the 1975 Civil
Rights law unconstitutional because it prohibited racial discrimination
by "private" businesses as well as states. So nobody dared bring
it up. Instead Homer's lawyer claimed that Louisiana's outrageous
treatment of his client was directly forbidden by the 14th Amendment
itself.

The 1896 Court said that Mr.
Plessey had been offered railroad accommodations that were "separate,
but equal." Since the "equal protection" clause of the 14th
Amendment only demanded "equal" protection, Homer should have no
complaint; and that was the end of the matter. Justice Harlan,
one of two holdovers from the 1883 Waite Court, again wrote a lonely
dissent stating the obvious; his "brethren" were playing word games to
obstruct the clearly expressed will of "We the People" when we ratified
the 14th Amendment.

There is a dangerous tendency in
these latter days to enlarge the functions of the courts, by means of
judicial interference with the will of the people as expressed by the
legislature. Our institutions have the distinguishing
characteristic that the three departments of government are co-ordinate
and separate. Each much keep within the limits defined by the
constitution. And the courts best discharge their duty by
executing the will of the law-making power, constitutionally expressed,
leaving the results of legislation to be dealt with by the people
through their representatives.

Unfortunately, Harlan had only one vote [10].

In 1865 the United States
survived a civil war. About half-a-million people died in that
war which also ended slavery in America. In 1868, we ratified the
14th Amendment to nullify the fraudulent Supreme Court ruling that
caused the war and to guarantee equal rights to the African Americans
we paid such a high price to free. In 1883, and again in 1896,
fraudulent actions by the Supreme Court put our 14th Amendment on ice.
It took three-quarters of a century before the Court quit
blocking it. For that entire period, African Americans suffered
forced racial discrimination in much of America. The U. S.
Supreme Court deserves a major share of blame for that; don't let
anybody convince you otherwise.

FREEDOM OF CHOICE IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL TOO

By 1954, our judicial branch
of government had spread its protective black robes over racism for
more than seventy years. Then the justices decided it was time to
get a new act. Public opinion in America was turning strongly
against racism, and the Court wanted to get on the right side of public
opinion. In 1954 it handed down Brown v. Topeka Board of Education,
thereby erasing America's collective memory of its seven decade crime
wave. However, outside of gaining favorable public relations for
the Court, Brown v. Topeka had no effect. A decade later, only 1.2 percent of Southern Black children went to integrated schools [11].

Then Congress passed the Civil
Rights Act of 1964. This law included a public accommodations
section (Title II) a lot tougher than the one the Court had killed off
in 1883. But the justices had no interest in blocking this one,
so the lower courts cheerfully enforced it.

The 1964 law also included
Title IV: Desegregation of Public Education. This law had
immediate and powerful effects on public school segregation: by 1968,
32 percent of southern Black children were attending integrated schools
and by 1972, 90 percent were doing so.

The 1964 Civil Rights law defined desegregation as follows:

"Desegregation" means the
assignment of students to public schools and within such schools
without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but
"desegregation" shall not mean the assignment of students to public
schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.

It also contained the following language:

. . . nothing herein shall
empower any official or court of the United States to issue any order
seeking to achieve a racial balance in any school by requiring the
transportation of pupils or students from one school to another or one
school district to another in order to achieve such racial balance, or
otherwise enlarge the existing power of the court to insure compliance
with constitutional standards.

Congress realized the obvious;
"equal protection" did not mean equal coercion. The 14th
Amendment did not mandate, or even allow, social engineering to make
the desegregation numbers look good. However, Congress wanted to
wash its hands of responsibility for any perversions (to paraphrase Abe
Lincoln) the Supreme court might perpetrate in this regard.
Congress, it turned out, had impressive foresight [12].

The Supreme Court was still a
racist institution. In 1968 it asserted that equal coercion was
exactly what the Constitution required. That year, in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, (1968). it ordered the lower federal courts "to assess the effectiveness of (desegregation
plans) in light of the facts at hand and any alternatives which may be
feasible and more promising, and to retain jurisdiction until it is
clear that state-imposed segregation has been completely removed."
"Any alternatives" turned out to mean massive forced busing
programs. And the removal of "state-imposed segregation" turned
out to mean forcing what Congress had called "racial balance,"
regardless of the causes of the imbalance.

In 1968 our judicial
employees ordered "We the People" to undertake a two-decade experiment
in equal coercion. The "constitutional" basis of that experiment
was at best speculative and at worst fraudulent. The experiment
resulted in millions of ruined educations, countless billions in wasted
tax dollars, and the destruction of our urban public school systems;
for that, you can and should blame the Supreme Court.

It's quite unlikely the
experiment was an honest mistake. The justices were probably
serving their second priority agenda; advancing the power and status of
the Supreme Court. During those same years they ran their own
institution like a plantation. You can learn the whole
disgraceful story in The Temple of Karnak, Chapters 15-19. Or you can read an updated version on the Internet.

NOTES AND CITATIONS

1. The Dred Scott opinion can be found on the Internet at http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/Scott/.
In a speech at Cincinnati, Ohio , in September of 1859, Abe Lincoln suggested what
he thought should be done about a renegade Supreme Court.
"The people of these United States are the rightful
masters of both congresses and courts, not to overthrow the
Constitution, but to overthrow the men who would pervert the
Constitution." Lincoln was quoted by Senator Jenner
during the August 20, 1958 debates on the ill fated Jenner-Butler
Bill. See the 1958 Congressional Record, Senate, page
18645.

3. The framers of the
14th Amendment had a great hostility toward the Supreme Court, blaming
the Dred Scott opinion for causing the Civil War and the Court for
several other usurpations. See the online essay, Unnatural Selection.
The 39th Congress which framed the 14th Amendment had a lopsided
Republican vs. Democrat majority; 42-10 in the Senate and 149-42 in the
House (the Republicans called themselves "Unionists" during that
session of Congress). The 43rd Congress which passed the 1875
enforcement law still had a lopsided Republican majority; 194 to 92 in
the House and 49 to 19 in the Senate. The nation had Republican
presidents both years. See the web site,
http://www.congressol.com/history.html.

For other examples of the
Court's fraudulent treatment of Congress's 14th Amendment enforcement
legislation, see the online essay, Congress Shall Not Have the Power. See also Carr, pages pages 35 - 47 and Appendix 1, Lusky (1993), pages 112ff, and Lusky (1975) pages 184 - 210.

4. Sections 2, 3, and 4 of the 14th Amendment have no relevance to the subject matter of this article.

6. In 1804-05, Congress attempted, and failed,
to impeach and remove a Supreme Court justice named Samuel Chase for trashing the Constitution. Ever since, our judicial employees had little fear of being held accountable for that sort of crime.

7. Two members of
the 1883 court were appointed by Lincoln, two by Grant, two by Hayes,
one by Garfield, and two by Arthur.